Leaves

by d. heidel

Jack Pike lay in his bed.  His brain had bled badly but was now stable: clotted, but not in a bad way, said the doctor.  The doctor cares for the body.  Knows and cares for the body.  The doctor does not care for the ego.  The brain is body.  It is also ego.  But the dichotomy does not seem to concern the doctor.  He says the brain had first clotted (in a bad way), had bled, and now had clotted in a not-so-bad way.

Jack Pike lay in his bed and combed his hair with a clump-knuckled right hand.  He saw himself as a dashing man.  Even now, as he lay in bed with a not-so-bad blood clot in his brain.  Even now, as he wore an adult-sized diaper situated to catch the offal of his bowels whenever that happened to be.  (His bowels hadn’t moved for the past six days.  Either they would move today or the bowels themselves would become the next loose seam of this unraveling body.)

Jack Pike ran a clump-knuckled hand through his hair again.  Thick hair.  Colored as an homage to the sun.  Grey and white hid beneath the artifice of color.  But grey and white look grisly – especially in contrast to a booth-tanned face.  And if there’s one thing Jack Pike did not want it was this: to look broken, to look maligned, to look chewed-up.  Not grisly.  Not like Grade D meat.  Grade D meat was for losers.  And suckers.  Jack Pike was a winner.

I am a winner, he said the words.  The words hit the wall flatly and made no difference to the silence of the room.

Jack Pike looked at the wall in front of him, saw the shifting forms of leaves caught by the sun in their infancy.

Jack Pike reached up now to play with the shadows that sifted through his window.  He did not think of the smell of spring and the effect that it has upon the limbic systems of old men and young men.  (Old men, of course, of course, are given to memory.  Young men, of course, of course, smell a wet warmth that lingers well into the nights and also smell skin and laughter and secrets and the slow chaos of wild oats.)

Jack Pike never thought about the things that lay beyond the tips of his fingers.

His fingers – these fingers – had lingered upon the flesh of women, upon women wreathed in gowns both red and brown.

Where is Sami?  He asked the question, but Sami was tired, surely, of the situation: tired of death, of clump-knuckled hands upon her bare cheek.

Even now, Jack Pike would not accept inevitability.  Now, there were shadows.  Jack Pike ran his fingers through the swarming net of those shadows.  The room was quiet enough that he could nearly feel the alternating heat and cool that lay upon his fingers as the silhouetted leaves flitted this way and that.

I can feel shadow, Jack Pike said.  But of course, there was no one to hear him say this.

And so it was, with the head of his bed to the window and the leaves making marionettes that writhed on the wall in front of him, Jack Pike for the first time in his life noticed shadow.  The weight of a body on the world around it was just that: shadow. 

The sun was westering but had not yet set.  Jack Pike did not see the sun, had lost track of time, had lost track of direction.  He ran a hand again through his hair.  Thick, luscious hair.  Dyed the color of a midatlantic summer.

Again his hands moved toward the light and the shadow and he felt the existence of luminiferous ether.  Christian Huygens, the Danish physicist suggested the concept of luminiferous ether to explain how light moves through empty space.  Of course, Jack Pike had never heard of Christian Huygens; of course, Jack Pike had no use for the Danes at all; and of course, Jack Pike had never heard of luminiferous ether.  But as he wove his fingers through the air, he saw edies and whorls and watched as the light and shadow flowed around his knuckles and arthritic wrists.

A bird chirped on the maple outside of his window.  Jack Pike did not hear that bird.  A couple was walking by with a springer spaniel that strained at its leash; of course, Jack Pike was oblivious to that as well.  All that Jack Pike could see were the shadows that were now crawling over his hand, his wrist, his arm.  And he knew that he would soon be breathing underwater, under the cosmic swirl of this invisible light-carrying soup.

The room was silent.

It is too quiet in here, were the words that he uttered.  But, with no one to hear them, they meant nothing to the world. 

Just like the sparrow meant nothing to Jack Pike.

Just like the couple and their springer spaniel and its jangling leash meant nothing to Jack Pike.

I tell you these things so that you might make meaning of all of this even as Jack Pike’s words fell out of his mouth and into the swirling abyss.